Over the last five years, the automobile market has seen a growing increase in SUV purchases. As the second-largest automobile category in New Zealand, Jaguar Land Rover realised they needed a holistic read of the New Zealand SUV market and where their brands sat within it.
“We needed data on what the market was truly thinking,” says Luke Meurant, National Marketing Manager for Jaguar Land Rover. Luckily, he knew who to turn to. In 2018, he enlisted Perceptive’s help to run a brand tracking programme to identify any strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for Jaguar Land Rover.
Before 2018, Jaguar Land Rover’s marketing activity was based on gut feel backed by lifetimes of experience in the industry across the brand’s many stakeholders.
“Experience counts for a lot,” says Luke. “But the problem we have is that the industry attracts a specific type of person who wants to work in it. All of us share similar backgrounds and demographics, so despite our combined industry experience, it is ultimately still one, shared point of view,” says Luke. “Unfortunately, it means we all see from the same sheet when it comes to marketing activities.”
With that in mind, Perceptive used insights, data, and science to build a more holistic view of the market to help Jaguar Land Rover understand how the consumers perceived their brands and what consumers wanted from premium SUV manufacturers.
In the first year of Jaguar Land Rover’s brand tracking programme, Perceptive ran an online survey targeting high-value vehicle owners and considerers. The survey consisted of a range of questions including the path to purchase, advocacy, brand perceptions, brand equity and brand conversion. In addition to the market survey, Perceptive conducted a second survey targeted at Jaguar Land Rover customers to better understand their path to purchase and brand advocacy.
As part of the programme, Perceptive also segmented Jaguar Land Rover’s customers to further understand their values, needs and aspirations. This helped Jaguar Land Rover better position and tailor their marketing messages to appeal to their different key audiences.
In 2019, Perceptive took the programme further, incorporating a series of in-depth interviews with premium vehicle owners to understand their pre- and post-journey purchase of their vehicles, and how brands could facilitate a more effective customer loyalty loop.
In 2021, new questions were added to the brand tracker to gain an understanding of any ‘external competitors’ along with the triggers that make people decide to purchase a new car.
"Perceptive has the ability to not only deliver the standard reporting as part of our programming but also help us frame up what areas to further investigate,“ says Luke. “Other research companies are really good at framing up what questions to ask, whereas Perceptive digs deeper to deliver answers and truly actionable insights.”
Brand and market tracking research showed us definitive evidence for why we were performing so well during the pandemics.
—Luke Meurant, National Marketing Manager for Jaguar Land Rover
Historically, Jaguar Land Rover’s marketing has been heavily focused on rational decision making, with specs and price being the main selling points. However, Perceptive’s brand and market tracking found that emotion has an important part to play in the purchase of a Jaguar or Land Rover. “We’ve been able to leverage this understanding to incorporate more emotional messaging into our advertising to show customers how our brands can fit into their lifestyles and reflect how they are seen by others,” says Luke.
Perhaps the biggest revelation for Luke and his team was understanding that their market was bigger than automotive providers. “Perceptive really helped us understand what our competitive set is,” says Luke. “We provide luxury cars, which makes us part of the luxury goods market. Because of this, we needed to go beyond only comparing ourselves to other vehicle brands.” As a result, Luke and his team were able to gain a deeper understanding of buyer behaviour and what factors weigh in their decision making—particularly in the wake of Covid-19.
“We were able to see what people were trading off to own a luxury car. Things such as home renovations, business investments, paying down debt, and the big one, international travel and holidays,” says Luke. “It showed us definitive evidence for why we were performing so well during the pandemics—it was because one of our major competitors had dropped out of the market.”
These insights were crucial in helping Jaguar Land Rover understand the market factors that contribute to low, medium, or high sales. They have also helped Luke and his team prepare for when international travel comes back on the market.
Despite the new technology and innovation being poured into Land Rover vehicles, Perceptive’s brand tracker found consumers thought of Land Rover as ‘a brand that’s had its day’ rather than ‘a brand that’s on its way up’.
“That surprised us,” says Luke. “While there is real brand strength for Land Rover in a traditional space, with recent technology enhancements we assumed it would have been seen as a brand on the way up. However, Jaguar significantly outperformed Land Rover on this metric.”
From this finding, Luke and his team are now working on re-energising the Land Rover brand. However, breathing youthfulness into a 75-year-old brand is no easy task, particularly when Land Rover is beholden to the global brand content from overseas. With this in mind, Luke focused on forging local partnerships.
“We looked at brands we could partner with to portray a more contemporary image,” says Luke. “For example, Superette was one brand we partnered with that was much more contemporary, on trend, and far less traditional. All of that activity came about as a result of Perceptive’s research.”
With Perceptive’s insights providing the data to make evidence-based decisions, Jaguar Land Rover has moved away from relying solely on experience and gut feel. Instead, they have broken their marketing strategy into three key elements: internal stakeholder needs, business capability, and data and science-backed insights. This allows them to continue to leverage the vast and critical industry experience of their stakeholders while adding consumer relevant insights.
“The intersection of these three areas is where our marketing strategy now sits,” says Luke. “It underpins everything we do. Without Perceptive’s insights strategy is not strategic. We need science as well as expertise behind our decision making.
“More than anything, the insights help us present cases for why we do or don’t do a particular marketing activity. We’re able to be smarter in our decisions.”
With every round of brand tracking offering Jaguar Land Rover a chance to explore new areas of interest and answer questions critical to the business, Luke is excited about what future findings Perceptive will uncover.
“The work we’ve done with Perceptive has fundamentally changed our strategy,” he says. “I can’t wait to see what our brands evolve into off the back of what we learn."
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